Video: Brick shader

The Brick shader is one of those features that really doesn't seem all that interesting, until of course you actually need to make a brick wall. The redesigned Brick shader in R13 makes this repeating pattern super easy. So I have here a very basic scene, it's just a Cube object, and it's sitting on a plane that has a stone material applied to it, and what I want to do is to create a new material for the brick pattern to reside in. So let's go down here to the Material Manager, and double-click to create a new material, and I'm going to name this material Brick, and let's apply this brick material directly to the Cube object.

This course spotlights the R13 update for MAXON CINEMA 4D, which includes some key improvements in the rendering, shader, and character tools. Author Rob Garrott shows animators how to find their way around the interface, and demonstrates features such as the Physical Render engine, with its camera and depth of field and motion blur controls; the CMotion system for creating parametric movement; and the new and revised shaders. The course also covers the streamlined workflow for Adobe After Effects Exchange and the new file format options OpenEXR and Xref.

Topics include:

Comparing the menus, viewports, and other interface differences

Enabling progressive rendering with the Physical Render engine

Building and applying rigs with the character object

Working with the new Collision Deformer

Using the new shaders: Mograph Multi Shader, subsurface scattering, brick, and more

Brick shader

The Brick shader is one of those features that really doesn't seem all thatinteresting, until of course you actually need to make a brick wall.The redesigned Brick shader in R13 makes this repeating pattern super easy.So I have here a very basic scene, it's just a Cube object, and it's sitting on aplane that has a stone material applied to it, and what I want to do is tocreate a new material for the brick pattern to reside in.So let's go down here to the Material Manager, and double-click to create a newmaterial, and I'm going to name this material Brick, and let's apply this brickmaterial directly to the Cube object.

Let's bring up the Interactive Render Region, Option+R or Alt+R on the PC, andthe Interactive Render Region, I've got the Quality slider turned all the way uphere, and I've sized it, so that I can see my entire brick wall.Let's deselect the cube, so we don't see these arrows and handles, and thenlet's select the actual material.I'm going to start off from the Color channel with the brick material.So let's go into the Color channel, and in the Texture pulldown go to Surfacesand then Brick at the very top.You can see a pattern of bricks immediately show up on our object.Let's zoom in just a bit here, just dial in so we fill the screen little bit more.

You can see that the pattern is very regular and we've got an alternating row ofdarker bricks everywhere and that's due to the settings in the Brick shader.Let's go into the Brick shader by clicking on the swatch here.The Shader has four basic categories to it, the Shader properties whichcontrol the size and shape of the bricks, the Color properties which controlthe colors of the bricks, and then the Gaps which controls what happens inbetween the bricks, and then the Dirt property which allows you to make thebricks less pristine.Let's start off in the Shader property, and I'm happy with the size and scale,but I could also adjust if I wanted to make my bricks smaller, I could bring theScale down to say about 15%.

You can see that the brick pattern gets a lot smaller, let's bring it back up toabout 20% so we have some nice large bricks there.You can also make the Height and Width a little more uneven.The part that I'm interested in though is the Shift and Reset, and the Shift andReset allows me to randomize the pattern a little bit.I'm going to adjust the Shift to like 75% and you can see that's going to offsetthe pattern and then the Reset Every nth Row, if I turn that up about 3, you'llsee that as I turn it up, the pattern offsets and starts to reset itself everysix rows, and that gives me a much more randomized feel to it.

So let's go down to the Color options, and in the Color options I don't likethese dark rows that are showing up, and so what I want to do is change the Alt Brick Color.I can twirl open the properties for the Alt Brick Color, and select the gradientknot here, and I am going to take this gradient knot color and I want to make itthe same as this gradient.So I can click on that, and in the Color Picker I can bring that up to abouthere or so, maybe get a little more red in there, and then close that up.You can see that blends those alternate colors in a little bit more.Let's twirl close the Gradient property here, and there is a Brick Noisescale, and let's zoom in on that.

And the Brick Noise Scale controls how much noise you get in the actual bricksthemselves, let's zoom in really close on that, that's one of the great thingsabout this being a shader is that you can zoom in very close, and I can adjustthe scale, let's bring it down to about 25%.You'll see the pattern of noise on the bricks get a little more dense.I can adjust the details, let's bring that up to say 15%, and you'll see thatpattern get even more intense.That's a little too heavy so let's bring that back down to say 5%.Now let's move over to the Gaps.The Gaps control what happens in between the bricks, I can adjust the colorusing this gradient here, the one I'm really concerned about is the Noise Scale,I want to tighten that up.

Let's bring the Noise Scale down to about .5;you're going to see the noise pattern in between the bricks really tighten up,and you can see it got a lot more dense there.You can also adjust the size and variation, but we're going to leave those alone right now.The Dirt option we're going to come back and adjust later.So that's it for the Color property for these bricks for now, and let's back outa bit, so we can see the whole wall.I'm going to go up one level in the Material, now what I need to do is thesebricks look okay, but they don't feel very realistic yet, that's because we needto give the bricks some dimension, and we're going to do that using theDisplacement channel.

So let's go back to the Basic properties and let's add in displacement, and oneof the cool things that we can do is we can use this exact same brick pattern tomodify the displacement of this cube.So let's go to the Color property, and we're going to click on the Texturepulldown and go to Copy Channel, and the Copy Channel, when I select it, copiesthe properties that I have here in this Brick shader to the clipboard, and thenwhen I go to the Displacement channel, I can click on this Texture pulldown andI can paste those very same properties back down again.When I do that, you're going to see my material modify dramatically here, butyou don't see anything happening here, that's because the Displacement channelis resolution dependent.

It's based on the resolution of the surface of your object and it's based on theresolution of the material.Right now, our Cube object is just one large rectangle, and one polygon can't bedisplaced, so we have to subdivide it.So I'm going to take the X and Y values and let's bring that up to about 20x20,and when I select the Cube, you're going to see -- let's turn off theInteractive Render Region for just a second.You can see that I now have more polygons on the surface of that cube, whereasbefore I had one polygon.Let's bring the Interactive Render Region back up, Option+R or Alt+R on the keyboard.

Now if we zoom in, you're going to notice we still don't see very muchdisplacement, that's because if we go to the Material, let's click back onMaterial and go into the Displacement property.The Height right now is set to only 5 units, so let's crank this up a bunch.Let's bring it to say 25.It's about 5 times larger, you see that the bricks got a little bit lumpy inspots, and that's because, once again, we still don't have quite enoughpolygons, but rather than keep cranking up the density of the polygons and thecube, I'm going to turn on something called Sub-Polygon Displacement, whichwill virtually subdivide the polygons at render time, and give me a much moreinteresting result.

So let's turn on Sub-Poly Displacement and instantly you'll see the brickpattern reveal itself.Now what's happening now is that the mortar in between the bricks is protrudingthrough, and we want to reverse that so that the mortar goes into the bricks,and so we take the Strength and we're going to reverse that to -100.And you see now we have the brick pattern coming in there.Let's bring the Subdivision Level up one more value, let's bring it up to 6,that's going to tighten that pattern up for us a lot more, there we go.Now you can see that we have very clearly defined bricks, and we have a veryclearly defined gaps in the bricks.

It's a little too thick right now, so let's take the Height down about 15, there we go.That makes the gaps a little less pronounced, and makes the brick pattern alittle more subdued.So that's it for the displacement.The next thing we want to do in the Basic properties is to turn on the Bump,and the Bump map is going to allow us to give a little more personality tothese bricks, and so I'll turn on Bump, nothing happens at first, that'sbecause the Bump value needs to have a grayscale image in order to work andwe're going to use Noise for that.So let's go to Noise, we'll click on that and add a noise filter.Now the default noise is not what we want, you can see it's added in this kindof wavy looking pattern.

We're going to click on the Shader here, and there's a great little pulldown onhere that allows you to see some interesting pictures, and those represent allthe different Noise types.We're going to grab one called Poxo, and the Poxo one is this little guy righthere, and it looks a lot like asphalt or brick, and when we add it in, you'regoing to see that Bump pattern changed dramatically.There we go, that starts to look a lot more brick like.It's a little too heavy now, let's go up to the main level of the material andbring the Strength down to about say 15%.Now the last piece of the puzzle, our bricks feel really shiny right now.We need to make them a lot less shiny, but we don't want to make themuniversally less shiny, we want to make them less shiny based on a randompattern, so they feel little bit more weathered.

So on the Basic properties, I'm going to activate Specular Color, and theSpecular Color channel controls where the specular highlight shows up, and whatcolor it is when it does show up.In the Specular Color channel we're going to, go to the Texture pulldown and addin Noise again, and you're going to see our specular highlight change a littlebit, and it's that same default pattern, that's not very interesting.Let's go to the Noise parameters again, and let's click on this little image andlet's grab Stupl I think will look really nice, add in the Stupl effect andyou see it breaks up that Noise pattern nicely.Let's make the Stupl much larger, Global Scale of say 1000, that's going todistribute that pattern a little more interestingly across the surface.

There we go, let's back out so we can see our wall in all its glory.It starts to look much more interesting and much more realistic.The last piece in the puzzle is the Dirt parameter in the Brick shader.Let's go back to our Brick Material, and in the Color channel, click on the BrickSwatch, and let's activate the Dirt.We're going to enable that, and we can have all kinds of different dirt patterns here.What we want to do is we want to have it go darker, and the way we're going todo that is by adjusting the Brick Blending.We're going to bring this Brick Blending down to -100, and that's going tomultiply that back into the brick pattern. There we go.

Now our brick wall looks really, really nice.So as you can see, the Brick shader is a great resource, and the repeatingpatterns that it makes have a lot of really great graphic possibilities, notjust brick walls, but all kinds of fun stuff.

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